Monday, October 5, 2009

Recycled Ideas

"Google Map 1" 3x24x36" acrylic on panel 2007-2008 Aron Namenwirth

This piece was not in my last show at vertexlist, as the Directors felt sculpture would be too confusing. As to Greg Allens Comment below: in response to Paddy including a link to my work, I welcome street traffic the more the merrier just as long as those who did the pioneering aren't written out of the history. With blogs, and internet this is less likely to happen. Correction: Sometimes people like Paul Davis don't get recognition deserved.

...is the name of an exhibition by the students of artist Olia Lialina. Lialina's contribution to the show is in the center, being (ironically) needlessly covered up:

Here is a full-sized version of the above photo (it should be viewed large to know what we are talking about in this post). On Lialina's website the photo's filename includes the words "crystallize and emboss," which are two of the better-known Photoshop effects filters. In an earlier post here we talked about Google's security filtering of satellite photos, which blogger Greg Allen suggested might make great landscape paintings. Lialina's piece was done several months before Allen's post; unlike Google, though, she hasn't just submitted one area of her sky-view to filtering but has "embossed" some areas and "crystallized" others so only a few parts of the photo appear not to have been tampered with. The embossing effect turns freeways into rivers of sparkly "bling," for example.

In my earlier post on this topic I was trying to recreate the filter Google uses and inattentively chose "stained glass." It is in actuality "crystallize," which Lialina has reminded me of with her image. The earlier post has been updated. Below is the detail entirely crystallized, like a vista in the J.G. Ballard book:

My take on Lialina's photo (and Google's clumsy censorship) is we are living in a fake reality and might as well enjoy it for the aesthetics.Google's program is a very strange one: on the one hand an almost 19th Century desire to map and catalog everything in the world but with pockets of 21st Century dishonesty and "spin" created for the sake of commercial and security state interests. Like all the artificial news that's proliferating, we just accept it and try to work around it.

Massive Links!POST BY PADDY JOHNSON

Google image via: greg.org

Greg.org notes Google’s security pixilation looks like art. Associate Editor and AFC curator Karen Archey remarked in the office today that the work reminded her of Kota Ezawa, Jason Salavon. I took Alfred Jenson mixed with Luc Tuyman’s palette, though I’m sure there’s an artist that more closely matches Google’s pixilations. Though not as well known, Aron Namenwirth certainly provides a very good match.Does anyone know how much money the 2008 art market pulled in? A few AFC readers have asked us this question recently, and while we wonder how accurate any number answering such a query might be, we defer to the experts on this matter. The hope is that the Art Market Monitor will be able to help us calculate the number, hopefully without placing it behind their paywall.The L Magazine has a feature up today on one of my favorite TV shows, Freaks and Geeks. The video here.

Does anyone play a lot of Counter Strike online? It’s a video game in which players attempt to shoot their online oppenents, and it’s very hard (I suck). Those who have played the game may appreciate the above song. Via: actionchristFinally, I know we gave Lindsay Pollock a hard time a while back, but we’ve been enjoying her gossipy blog lately.

12:14 pm

At one point, I put “like Jules de Balincourt and Trevor Paglen playing in Ruth Root’s basement” in the post, but I took it out.

Still, there’s someone stuck in my head who makes Mehretu-size flying color polygons-on-white. Can’t think of his name or which Phillips de Pury sale he was flipped at. Not Eberhard Havekost…

greg.org // 28 Sep 2009, 2:07 pmhah, just clicked through Aron’s link. I hear him right now going, “Move on, pal, I’m workin’ this side of the street.”